I think this exchange perfectly illustrates the debate over the Magic Coin Trick. Krugman wanted to get into nuance and detail and talk about this like it was a classroom exercise without real world consequences. But the value of money is entirely arbitrary, determined by how much “full faith and credit” people place in it. It doesn’t really matter if you’re right in some long-haired technical sense if the market decides you are full of shit. As Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, should know, the market is always has the final word. It doesn’t matter how good your idea is if the market doesn’t agree.

Stewart, for all his flaws, cuts to the chase: even if technically legal, the Coin was a stupid idea. And it’s a good illustration of how unserious Krugman really is.

As you may not have heard, Glenn Beck and his family were assaulted in a New York City park. Now, first, before I get into it, I will clarify that when I say “assault”, it seems to have been only in the legal sense of the word… what happened to them was assault by the legal definition, and was from the moment the wine was spilled on his wife. That’s assault, brotha, even if it’s not the fist-meet-face sort.

Of course, reaction from the left in general has ranged from “It’s just more of his demented lies, no one who opposes Glenn Beck would do such a thing” to “The bastard had it coming, it’s his own fault, shame it wasn’t something worse”. Well… those two things don’t work together terribly well, but hey, doesn’t stop some people from putting them together in the exact same post on the subject.

Of course, Glenn Beck has the right to his views and no-one should ever take that right away from him… but y’know, the right to speak goes both ways, so if someone wants to boo and heckle you, they’ve got that right too, especially if you’re the kind of bloke who can lose his bap on-air and furious slate a caller, only for you to call them a “pinhead”.

So, just to be clear, having a TV show and saying things people don’t like means that people can shout at you and insult you as you walk along the street. It also excuses physical damage to your person or possessions. Might as well have been honest and followed up “but y’know” with what he actually meant, “he shouldn’t be allowed to actually speak about them”. In fact, note the distinction there… Beck has the right to his views, not to express his views. Clearly, being a conservative is okay, just so long as you don’t go around making it all obvious you’re a conservative. Y’know. Maybe you could tone down the conservativeness, to spare the feelings of those who could be offended. Be conservative on your own time, not in public where children could be exposed to that sort of lifestyle. Don’t see how that could be offensive to ask of all you Pubs.

Speaking of closet conservatives, expect to see a lot of Beatles CDs burn-… I mean, mp3s deleted. Turns out that Lennon was not the die-hard, eternal counterculture true believer many thought he was. I think this has a high probability of being true, since the one dropping this little revelation tries to make excuses for him:

“He’d met Reagan back, I think, in the ’70s at some sporting event. … Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young [peace] demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that. … He did express support for Reagan, which shocked me,” he told “Beatles Stories” filmmaker Seth Swirsky.

First of all, looove the ambiguous wording there. “Go after”. Just enough to imply horrible things without actually giving any claims to be debunked. The incident between the national guard and the protestors has become like a drinking story for the left re: the right’s fascist tendencies. Every time it gets told, it’s more violent and more of a jackbooted crackdown. But aaaanyway, the fact that he tries to excuse Lennon by saying he “forgot” about it it, while making sure to bring it up all the same, says this guy is probably speaking the truth when he talks about Lennon’s conservative leanings. “Don’t hate him too much for it, okay? It may have been just a phase or something. It’s not like he was one of those flaming conservatives.”

But speaking of entertainers, and wandering back to the Beck incident, let us ponder the person of Jon Stewart. The man who held a supposedly sincere “Rally to Restore Sanity”, to plead with people to tone down their partisan hatred, to cut down on the vicious rhetoric. (Okay, so he doesn’t allow conservative pundits on his show, but he really isn’t partisan, honest!) But hey, that’s just his show, right? It’s just comedy. Surely, being that the Rally was a non-partisan effort to reach out and plead for reasonable discourse, he would take some time to deplore the actions taken towards Glenn Beck, yes? That’s not very sane, that’s not very reasonable, it deserves chastisement from someone whose opinion could theoretically matter to the perpetrators.

Sadly, it doesn’t look like he’s going to find time to do so, what with his busy schedule of making racist comments about Herman Cain. Don’t expect to find the video on the Daily Show’s site… or much on youtube, either, straaaangely enough, as this was the best I could find. (Admittedly, maybe I’m not looking in the right places. Feel free to prove me wrong on that one.)

Sorry for the nasally douche after, but that’s the only clip of the actual incident I could find. Most of the videos regarding the incident are liberals defending Stewart for making “the obvious joke” and sneering at Cain for having a thin skin. Similarly, most of the news articles (of which there are few) on the subject are busy making Stewart the victim, accusing Cain of playing the race card and of being thin-skinned about a harmless joke.

If you have to take a moment to actually process the irony of all this without your head exploding, I understand. I think we all need a headache break after that one. If you don’t, maybe it’s time to reevaluate your standards.

Let’s just take a moment to think about this, alright? A white political pundit mocks a black politician using a racial stereotype, caps it off with stating that the black politician is obviously stupid because he “doesn’t like to read”, and the general response of the news media is… to defend the white guy and chastise the black guy.

I mean, sure, this isn’t actually anything new. For godsakes Fox itself airs at least an hour of what’s essentially the same thing every week. Seth MacFarlane votes Democrat and openly despises conservatives and everything even slightly related to conservatives (except Conway Twitty, I don’t know if that’s him being deliberately ironic or what… oh, and Fox, obviously, whose money he’s glad to accept lots and lots of), so he can get away with making openly racist jokes. Same thing with Stewart… he is a Speaker Of The Narrative, to be defended no matter what.

Fun little side note here, when trying to look up the racist quotes made about Clarence Thomas by various people, I discovered that leftists have their own catchy little name for blacks who go off the reservation by registering Republican: “Rethuglitoms”. Shockingly, Google and Wikipedia seem to have buried or deleted most of these references… I know, I wouldn’t have expected that either. (Where’s the sarcasm tag? Ah screw it.) It doesn’t seem to have bothered to cover up the same vitriol by black people themselves, though… Spike Lee, so famously angry at white people for, well, living, doesn’t seem to have had problems referring to Thomas as a “chicken-and-biscuit eating Uncle Tom”… a statement I’m sure he feels proud of every time he looks over his large collection of black stereotype memorabilia.

Again, anyway. Even if you don’t agree with the tactic some are starting to suggest… that conservatives borrow from Democrat-supporters and begin decrying all criticism of Cain as racist, even when it’s obviously not… it’s hard to argue that Stewart’s comments would not have been considered wildly racist had they been made about Barack Obama. Well… it’s obviously not that hard, you’ve just got to abandon those little things like “integrity” and “honesty” and “consistency” and then it starts getting really really easy, to judge by the amount of it. Heck, go looking for the story yourself, you’ll have a tough time finding one that even mentions the incident outside of the context of defending Stewart and rebuking Cain (or, at the very least, tries to spin it as Cain letting Stewart off the hook).